🌈Reading Rainbow🌈

Understanding tarot cards through color

Artwork by Dave Danzara of Lost In Time Designs

In celebration of the most rainbow-forward month of the year, we’re diving into tarot card color theory.

History of Hues

Color theory is the study of colors and the way they interact with each other, our emotions, and our behavior. When I hear the term “color theory” I picture bespectacled creative directors and fashion designers with fistfuls of clothing swatches, but color theory is not some modern invention. Like most things, it goes back to Aristotle and it affects us all.

Miranda Presley, the Aristotle of our generation. Image from The Devil Wears Prada. Meme by ALTARU TAROT.

A quick timeline of color theory:

3150 – 30 BCE | Color as Symbol | Ancient Egyptians believed color held symbolic meaning, connecting each one to concepts like rage, purity, fertility, and rebirth.

330 BCE | Color as Element | Aristotle believed all colors came from a mixture of light and dark and grouped them by one of my favorite frameworks: the elements—earth, fire, water, and air.

1660 CE | Color as Spectrum | Isaac Newton became the original illuminati by upending 2000 years of color theory when he shone a light through a glass prism. He revealed that white light contains a visible spectrum of color we now call a rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

1810 CE | Color as Emotion | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe challenged Newton’s scientific perspective by studying color through the subjective emotional impact it has on the viewer. Though scientists didn’t stan this theory, it became popular among philosophers and artists.

Goethe’s symmetric color wheel (1809) Mental frames and emotional traits on the wheel include “Vernunft” (Reason), “Phantasie” (Imagination), “Sinnlichkeit” (Sensuality), and “Verstand” (Understanding).

While there are many more people who influenced color theory, I like marrying Goethe’s work with that of the Ancient Egyptians. Building a symbolic language that evokes emotion when we look at the cards helps us understand the hidden messages they contain and the stories our subconscious is waiting to reveal.

So let’s learn how to build our own symbolic color systems!

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Taste the Rainbow

To me, tarot is an artistic practice first. Just like works of art, when we look at the images on the cards in different color formations new stories arise, reflecting back the way we see the world and ourselves.

Let’s build a rainbow bridge between your tarot practice and your own symbolic color system.

Artwork by @avitro_gato

How to Build a Symbolic Color System

• Choose one color in your tarot deck. For those that are differently sighted—choose any color that stands out to you. Alternatively you can look at shadow and light or saturation. Whatever you see, you’re building a visual schema that’s specific to your view of the world.

• Make a list of all your associations with that color. Let your mind run wild and deep. Emotions. Foods. Seasons. Moods. Cities. Animals. Songs. Ages. Eras. Conjure your own synesthesia.

• Pull all the cards in the deck that are dominated by that color.

• Write down what you observe.

  • What story do the cards tell?

  • What mood do they evoke as a collective?

  • What different energies emerge across the foreground and background of a card?

  • How do the number of colors impact the card’s narrative?

Additional Exercises

Artwork by feminist-activist artist collective Buibere nia Riska

• Look at all the colors across different groups.

  • Suit (Pentacles, Wands, Cups, Swords): How does each suit’s color story differ?

  • Number: How do the Aces compare to the Kings or the Fives or the Sevens?

  • Arcana: Do the three lines of the major arcana tell different color stories?

• Do a tarot reading solely based on color. Then interpret the same cards relying on other tarot tools (intuition, traditional card meanings, symbols, numbers, etc.) How do the readings differ? How are they the same?

Building a symbolic color system takes time. You are constructing a scaffolding on which to hang your multi-colored wardrobe, and soon you’ll be mixing and matching color with your other tarot skills like Cher and her rotating closet.

Cher may have been clueless about love, but she knew her colors. Image from Clueless.

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Color Across Cultures

Artwork from Hueism by Derrick Ofosu Boateng

Color is a wordless language that can shift mood and meaning with a flash of its coattails. Like rivers of wet paint, it merges and diverges across cultures and time.

The colors below are what show up in the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, but if periwinkle or some other color is prominent in your deck, add it to your schema! Behind each association are years of myths and legends. What will yours be?

And, because it wouldn’t be a tarot newsletter without it, a few key words from the culture of tarot:

• Red: Passion, willpower

• Orange: Directed action, creativity

• Yellow: Illumination, enlightenment

• Green: Growth, manifestation

• Blue: Truth, knowledge

• Purple: Spirituality, intuition

• Black: Protection, oppression

• White: Purity, potential

• Grey: Neutrality, unknown outcomes

• Brown: Stability, grounding

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Your True Colors

Image by ALTARU TAROT

No extra bits and bobs this month, just an early aughts pop culture reference meets tarot nerd moment.

Miranda and Andy in their cerulean blue and brownish-gold smocks just living their best, imbalanced Two of Cups life. Can’t believe how their colors match the card.

May you find the symbolic (or literal!) gold at the end of your rainbow 🌟🌈

XO

ALTARU TAROT

P.S. A little gift from the queer gods at NYC’s 34th Annual Dyke March